Unveiling the Hidden Harmonies: How John Garrison’s Memoir Transforms Music into Life’s Untold Stories
Music as Throughline
Songs play a central role in Hua Hsu’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Stay True. In it, the author chronicles his own growth as he starts college by tracing the music he’s exposed to. The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” appears throughout Stay True, and Hsu’s changing feelings about the song signal his growth. At one point, Hsu’s friend, Ken (to whom the book is an extended elegy) orchestrates a sing-along in the car. Hsu had previously despised sing-a-longs, but this time:
“In the immediacy of the song, as its seconds tick away, you’re experiencing it as a community—as a vision of the world vibrating together. It tickles your ear, then the rest of your body, as your voice merges with everyone else’s. The violent dissonance when someone, and then another, slips off-key, and everyone ventures off toward their own ba-ba-baa solo. I finally felt in my body how music worked. A chorus of nonbelievers, channeling God.”
